


Tooms

by leiascully



Series: The FBI's Most Unwanted [23]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode Related, Gen, Monsters, Partnership
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-08 18:19:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4315455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"If there's an iced tea in that bag," he said, "could be love."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tooms

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: 1.20 "Tooms"  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

Scully bought the sandwich - liverwurst, because it amused her - and a root beer. Mulder probably needed caffeine, but she wanted him to sleep. The sugar would keep him awake just long enough to get home. He had been up for days, strung out on coffee and stubbornness. The best she could do was gentle him into accepting her help. Being Mulder's partner also, from time to time, meant being his handler, his keeper, his helpmeet. He had been alone for too long, she thought; he still would not ask her for relief.

They had come so far on this case. She and Briggs had found Tooms' missing victim, finally laying that poor soul to rest after sixty years entombed in cement. They were so close to definitive proof that could put Tooms away. She wasn't willing to risk their success on Mulder's state of sleep deprivation. The meeting with Skinner had made her painfully conscious of their need to close this case, and it had to be by the book. 

What was by the book about monsters like Tooms? He was, for all his other oddities, as psychopathic as any of the other killers they'd brought to justice. She understood, in some small way, Mulder's frustration with her: they had presented the evidence, and the courts had rolled their eyes and called it science fiction. At least she gave him the benefit of the doubt. But he had proven himself to her over and over, in the strength of his convictions if not the verity of them; he had only one chance before the judge, and she had cringed to hear the way he sounded, like some madman rambling out of control. 

If Mulder went by a book, it was a work of literary fiction, abstruse but beautiful, elevated to some higher level than the public or their superiors wanted to comprehend. He was true to himself. She might read him from cover to cover and not find a contradiction. That was rare and exquisite and too strange for this world. No wonder the Smoking Man sought to ban him from his work. Their work. 

She had been sent to spy on Mulder, to debunk and devalue his work, but she had known on the first day that it was an assignment she would fail utterly to complete. She could not give the suited men in the upper offices what they wanted. There would be no justice in shutting him down. They had built something that worked in their seclusion, found a balance that made the world a safer place. That meant something. It meant a great deal more than she could put words to. After Alaska and Wisconsin, after Phoebe and Jack, after Boggs and Barnett and the Kindred, they had forged something fine. 

She wanted to tell him, but in the car, confined in the smallness of their world of two, she still couldn't find the way to say it. 

"Fox," she said, the sound of his name strange in her mouth. But he had called her "Dana" in the days after her father's death, when the barriers between them had been thinned by her grieving vulnerability.

He huffed a laugh. "I even made my parents call me Mulder. So...Mulder."

There were boundaries between them tonight, then, walls made necessary by the inches of space between them. Over the past two years, they had seen each other undressed, unkempt, unhinged. They had woken up together in the Olympic forest after an uneasy night. They had shouted and whispered. They had been each other's only confidantes. They had watched lights dance in the sky. They were witness to impossible things. It was too much for two to bear.

"Mulder," she said, "I wouldn't put myself on the line for anybody but you." 

He looked at her and she thought he understood. 

"If there's an iced tea in that bag," he said, "could be love." As if love could wrap its arms around all they were to each other. She had loved before and this was different. It was like communion, finally sipping the richness of wine after years of grape juice. She could believe there was transformation in this and some kind of salvation. But it was just like Mulder to push her away and pledge his heart in the same moment. Now she laughed and bowed her head and kept him at arms' length. 

"Must be fate, Mulder. Root beer." She held out the bottle.

He sighed his teasing disappointment. 

"You're delirious," she told him. "Go home and get some sleep."

He went, but not willingly, in his car that smelled strongly of pine and faintly of sweat. She stayed and kept their lonely vigil, listening to Pete Rose Late Night Sports Radio and gazing at a liverwurst sandwich. If their successes could not save him, she would find another way, and she would do it by the book. 

In the end the justice was not what she'd hoped for, but at least it was an end. Mulder, moody, prophesied change, but she was simply grateful for another day. There would be other chances. There would be other monsters. They might still find salvation.


End file.
